Reading proficiency of youthful students, in modern schools, has been decreasing alarmingly in the past twenty years. Studies have attributed this problem to numerous social influences. Most prominantly blamed factors are more permissive theories of education and the domination of leisure hours by television. Various educational handicaps such as dyslexia and economic/social background have been identified as stubborn problems which resist even the very expensive and intense experimental programs which have been mounted to counteract these effects. Computer aided systems are in place in some school systems for teaching objective subjects but the benefits available with such systems are limited to those students capable of reading at the required level. Due to the fact that mastery of reading is a tedious and difficult task for many children, the only technique which is generally successful for most students with reading difficulty is a one-to-one student/teacher relationship. The one-to-one relationship provides speed and flexibility which enables the student to read quickly enough through the reading material so as to gain the satisfaction and reward from perceiving the meaning of the material before frustration and defeatism bring work to a halt. However, this one-to-one teacher/student ratio is too expensive to be practical in most schools. Additionally, the one-to-one technique is not generally successful for the teaching of older students because of the embarrassment and negative self-appraisal arising from repetitive correction, frustration and student/teacher fatigue.
The prior art audio techniques employ devices for teaching pronounciation of words in a foreign language. These devices permit a student to practice his/her pronounciation of words and then to listen to his/her pronounciation immediately before or after the pronounciation by an expert. However, such techniques do not permit selective interaction with the student to support practice in visually decoding (reading) and understanding the written form of a language.
Speaking machines have also been used in conjunction with devices which pronounce words to test a students ability to spell the pronounced words. While such a device is indirectly useful in teaching a reading skill, it is not capable of interacting directly and flexibly in the teaching of the reading of a language.
One of the difficult problems in the first few years in the teaching of reading to children is the inability to provide text material having sufficient interest to hold the reader's attention while, at the same time, not exceeding the child's reading vocabulary. If this problem had been solved, it would be expected that much more rapid reading progress would be achievable because the child would be internally motivated resulting in more efficient reading time. This is true at least through the eighth year in most schools since a child's reading vocabulary remains less than his speaking vocabulary through those years.